A federal judge has indefinitely halted a sentencing hearing previously scheduled for next month after prosecutors admitted last week that they presented in court evidence obtained through the controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Judge Garr M. King for the United States District Court for the
District of Oregon ruled on Tuesday that the December 18
sentencing hearing for convicted would-be bomber Mohamed Osman
Mohamud, 22, must be stricken following revelations made just
days earlier by the federal prosecutors who earlier this year won
a guilty conviction against the Somali-American man.

The prosecution had filed a notice with the court last Tuesday,
November 19, acknowledging for the first time that intelligence
collected through a FISA-authorized warrantless wiretap was
“offered into evidence or otherwise used or disclosed in
proceedings,” which concluded this past January when a jury
found Mohamud guilty of attempting to use a weapon of mass
destruction.

Prosecutors said Mohamud, then
only 19, intended to blow-up an annual Christmas tree lighting
ceremony in Portland, Oregon in 2010, but they thwarted him by
conducting a months’ long investigation that culminated in a
sting where authorities supplied their suspect with a phony bomb.
He was scheduled to be sentenced next month and is eligible for
life in prison, but the recent revelation regarding the
government’s use of FISA to collect information may have
indefinitely delayed the outcome of the case.

According to Judge King’s determination this week, the court
anticipates motions to be filed due to the government’s
acknowledgment that FISA provisions were utilized during their
investigation, a maneuver that is expected to drag the case well
into next spring. King ordered that next month’s sentencing
hearing be stricken and, “if sentencing remains
appropriate,” both sides have until April 4, 2014 to file
motions. Assuming other motions will then be filed in response,
the court expects the next phase of the already lengthy ordeal to
last through May.

Judge King’s decision came three years to the day after
authorities arrested Mohamud and accused him of using a fake car
bomb to wreak havoc in Portland. Arthur Balizan, the Federal
Bureau of Investigation’s special agent in charge of the sting,
said in a statement released after the arrest that “the threat
was real,” but the explosives were not. Now three years
later, critics of FISA and the controversial authorities it
provides to investigators, may reconsider if the Mohamud’s
conviction is real.

NPR reporter Carrie Johnson said the decision to prolong the
pre-sentencing phase “could foreshadow months or even years of
legal wrangling, if the case becomes a vehicle to challenge the
constitutionality of once-secret NSA monitoring of overseas email
and social media accounts.” Indeed, the National Security
Agency’s reliance on FISA as a counterterrorism tool has long
been opposed by the likes of the American Civil Liberty Union and
other like-minded groups who have branded the secretive court as
nothing more than a rubber-stamp to approve broad, otherwise
unlawful probes. Recently disclosed NSA documents attributed to
former contractor Edward Snowden, however, have revealed this
year exactly how widely the government relies on FISA to gather
information on people, innocent or guilty.

“The Supreme Court this year turned back a challenge to
surveillance law by a group of human rights workers, lawyers and
reporters because they could not demonstrate they had been
monitored or subjected to any harm,” Johnson wrote, “But
the fresh disclosure to Mohamud and a series of other defendants
in cases where US prosecutors used secret surveillance could help
overcome that hurdle.”